(Pic of Phobos-Grunt courtesy of Roscosmos)
Going to Mars is never as easy as people seem to think. The United States has had multiple failures of Mars missions and it looks as though the Russian space agency is having their own failure right now.
The mission is called Phobos Grunt (Grunt translates to ground) and it was supposed to go to the Red Planets moon Phobos, land, collect samples and return. Unfortunately the chances of that happing are looking very slim at this point.
The mission was launched on Wednesday where it achieved low orbit around the Earth. It was supposed to fire its rockets to boost it to a higher and more circular orbit then fire them again to send it on its way Mars.
Those rocket firings have not happened and Roscosmos (the Russian agency) has been completely unable to reach the probe via radio signals. It is currently in an elliptical orbit that losing about 6,600 feet per day. If they are unable to communicate with the probe it will eventually crash back into the Earth.
If you feel like there is a lot of Mars launches and activity in the last few months, then you would be right. There is a launch window for the closest trajectory between Earth and Mars every 780 days. We are nearing the end of this launch window now.
This has not been a good year for Roscosmos. They have had multiple launch failures including on of the Soyuz rocket that is used to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. In fact the failure of this launch system and the canceling of the Space Shuttle program are going to mean at least a temporary abandonment of the ISS by humans later this year.
Fox “News” has a kind of triumphalist headline noting that this is the 18th failure of a Mars mission by the Russians. They have to go all the way back to 1960 to start that count. The thing that this short article completely misses is that this is, well not to put too fine a point on it, rocket science, it is not like shooting off a bottle rocket.
Mars is, at the theoretical closest, 33.55 million miles away, with an average distance of just short of 140 million miles. Going that distance is not a trivial thing and there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
The US has lost several Martian probes including Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Observer and Mars Polar Lander. The reasons for these losses vary from launch failures to software glitches to, tragic-comically a mistake in the units used to measure distance for the landing software.
To mock the Russian efforts is to make light of incredibly difficult endeavor that space exploration is. That said it seems that there is something systematically wrong with the current efforts by Roscosmos. Every program has failures but this last year has seen more problems than successes for the Russians.
Most of the failures seem to be in the launch stage and it has been suggested by the incident investigators that the problem is one of production, meaning that the factories which are building the launch vehicles have a serous quality control problem.
As hard difficult as performing science is space is, the job made exponentially harder by manufacturing failures.
While we can have some sympathy for the Russian program, if the Phobos-Grunt probe does crash into the Earth it has the potential to cause its own problems. There are 22,000 pounds of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide rocket fuel on the probe. It is thought that it will stay liquid until the orbit decays, in which case it will explode fairly high above the Earth.
However the longer it takes the orbit to decay (assuming the Russians are not able to contact it and fix the problem with software ) the more likely it will that it will freeze and that is a different kind of bad news.
The probe is large enough that some of it might make it all the way to the Earth. The Hydrazine is very toxic stuff. If the craft survives reentry without exploding, there is a strong likelihood of a toxic spill where ever it hits.
The good news, such as it is, is that most of the Earth’s surface is covered with water and it is likely that it will impact somewhere in a remote ocean. Though at this point we do not really know for sure where it will deorbit and so can not say if that best case of the worst case scenario is going to happen.
In this end it just points out that there is a reason we use rocket science as an example of something that is really difficult and exacting.
The floor is yours.